The course,
beginning in February and ending in June, has enjoyed a high level of demand
and participation. The participating teachers have found it to be a
wonderful opportunity to develop their teaching practice. Getting to know
different cultural aspects of English speaking countries through the English
language has been a very positive experience.

At the same time the course entails the updated use of new technologies and, in
particular, of one of the most important resources of the web 2.0: BLOGS.

The speakers,
participants and myself, as the responsible teacher trainer of this course,
were asked to write entries in the course´s blog and to upload the
materials and presentations created during the course, as well as to
comment on good classroom practices. This
blog will be
made public as soon as the course finishes.

As the main goal of this training activity has been to promote linguistic
competence in English through the knowledge of popular customs, traditions and
celebrations of the English-speaking world, the course has been taught entirely
in English by native speakers.

The speakers were Neda Milenova, a translator and teacher trainer, and Thomas
Walter Steele, a language assistant. While Neda is a native British
speaker, Thomas is American. So, not only have we enjoyed the chance of
listening to both accents, but we have also shared one
common objective: to be trained in dealing with activities and
methodological resources with the aim of bringing these celebrations to our
students, as well as designing assessment strategies for them.

As part of every session of
the course, attendees have given talks in English, presenting the materials and resources that they have
prepared to teach these topics to their students.

miércoles, 30 de mayo de 2012

I think most people are familiar with TED, the magnificent website about popular science lectures.
The website allows browsing through different ways to access and one of them is the tag, including naturally language.
In this section we find several conferences about metaphorical uses, comedy, “apartheid” language, and learning languages. One of the most representative of these is the treatment of the origin of language, on both a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic scale; that is to say, the origin in human species and the origin in children. In relation to the first, we highlight two conferences. On the one hand, a conference by Mark Pagel, who believes that the greatest contribution of human language was the birth of social technology; and on the other hand, Susan Savage-Rumbaugh, who talks about the bonobos (great apes that found in Congo) wich illustrate the birth not only of speech but also of writing. In addition to these two conferences, the physicist Murray Gell-Mann's commentary explains the African origin of language through mathematical analysis.

In the other group, the ontogenetic scale, we find the Patricia Kuhl conference. Surprisingly, this label does not appear in a conference on this very important topic by Deb Roy, The Bird of a Word, which shows the imperfection of the labeling system. In both, we see the surprising ability that children have to learn one language or several languages​​.
In general, we may make the following conclusions:
- The origin of human language from a biological transformation is not enough to explain its appearance. Language is culture.
- Language development in children is so important that one of the fundamental aspects of child protection would be language.